Can't Find My Way Home

Nick Gillespie

Between an encyclopedic bibliography and dozens of original interviews with folks ranging from the Doors' record producer Paul A. Rothchild to National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML) founder Keith Stroup to the "acid angel" Dawn Reynolds, the reader gets a contact high from touring a number of legendary drug-infused scenes. Allen Ginsberg's reading of Howl at San Francisco's Six Gallery; a typically debauched evening at New York's Studio 54, "the high temple of the Great Stoned Age"; the seminal '90s Ecstasy event A Rave Called Sharon -- Torgoff represents all these and more in well-rendered detail. He also gives due weight to gloomier tales, ranging from Charlie Parker's tormented love affair with heroin to '60s clown Wavy Gravy's showdown with Charles Manson at a California commune to the suicide of High Times magazine founder Tom Forcade.
— The Washington Post

Publishers Weekly

Torgoff challenges what he calls America's "cultural amnesia" about recreational drug use during the last half-century, staking out a rhetorical middle ground that acknowledges both the pervasive cultural influence and the costs of overindulgence. The problem with his panoramic account is its focus on celebrities, especially among the creative classes, whose stories have already been told. That makes for a series of often stunning images Charlie Parker in the grip of heroin addiction, Wavy Gravy confronting Charles Manson, John Belushi snorting cocaine on live TV especially given Torgoff's skills as an interviewer (and the good fortune of getting to talk with key figures like Herbert Huncke and Timothy Leary before their deaths), but at the expense of discovering what happened once various drugs made their way to ordinary folks in the suburbs. Torgoff (who won an ASCAP Deems Taylor Award for American Fool, about John Cougar Mellencamp) does touch on that by opening with his own early drug use on '60s Long Island and closing with a poignant encounter with an aged homeless junkie, and the book could have used more stories like that. The discussion of the government's "war on drugs" is somewhat scattershot; though detailed on President Carter's flirtation with relaxing the laws and the militancy of the "Just Say No" era, there's nothing about Nixon's policies a particularly stunning omission since the DEA was created during his administration. Torgoff creates compelling juxtapositions, and he's not afraid to ask difficult questions, but he hasn't truly broken new ground. Agent, Russell Galen. (May 13) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Torgoff (American Fool) presents a history of the production, distribution, and use of heroin, LSD, marijuana, cocaine, and other drugs in America since World War II, told principally from the perspective of drug users. The book opens with the marijuana users and heroin addicts of the 1940s Bebop jazz scene and the nascent Beat generation. We see Charlie "Bird" Parker playing hot jazz and killing himself with heroin, and Jack Kerouac and the Beats smoking pot and taking amphetamines. Then, in the early 1960s, marijuana begins its rise into the mainstream, while Timothy Leary touts LSD as a cure-all consciousness expander. Throughout, Torgoff includes interviews with marijuana farmers in California, heroin junkies and cocaine snorters in New York, and members of the gay drug scene in San Francisco. He juxtaposes the reasons users give for their habits--artistic expression, social rebellion, alternative medicine--against the wasted lives, mental problems, and massive social costs of drug abuse. He is convincing in his argument that postwar America cannot be understood without examining the role drugs have played in American music, politics, and social relations. This book would be a useful supplement in any course on American history or culture since 1945 and can be appreciated by lay readers as well. Highly recommended for academic and public libraries.--Duncan Stewart, Univ. of Iowa Libs., Iowa City Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Music writer Torgoff informally collects scenes from the illicit drug culture during the second half of the 20th century. As all the singular and emblematic figures in the dope world over the last 50 years come walking through the author's door, he passes on their words-good, bad, indifferent, paranoid-or tenders a bit of their drug history if they're dead. Torgoff is not here to pass judgment, but rather to chronicle the rise of illicit drug use. He takes the middle road. Demonizing dope is absurd and pointless, he argues, and it's equally nutty to claim that drugs are harmless, as a percentage of users will always experience abuse problems. He simply wants to know what Timothy Leary and William Burroughs were after. (The former said he learned "that consciousness and intelligence can be systematically expanded"; the latter noted after his first injection, "Well, now, that's very interesting"). Allen Ginsberg's "optical consciousness" interests him too. Torgoff paints a sad picture of Charlie Parker, who emerges as something of an idiot savant with one overwhelming fixation enwrapping one prodigious talent, and an equally sad picture of the Summer of Love: as novelist Tom Robbins said, "All utopias attract thugs, like iron filings to a magnet." The hope for utopia, Torgoff notes, forms a major part of dope's attraction, as do the brilliance of drug-fueled synesthesia and the wildness of literary forms created by users. In the 1960s, he recalls, smoking dope led to other kinds of rebellion: "All you had to do was get high to understand in the most visceral sense that the government was lying about pot; once you saw through that hoax, you started questioning what the authorities weresaying about everything else." Or maybe you got lost to bad acid or crack. Anything was possible. Maybe it was all just (mostly) fun, but Torgoff's father's question remains unanswered: "What did any of it really mean?"Agent: Russell Galen/Scovil Chickak Galen